Showing posts with label culture/politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture/politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 24, 2025

The Modernity Machine

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I want to pass on to readers this Venkatesh Rao substack essay that summarizes what his book club has learned in the past year:  The Modern...
Monday, November 17, 2025

From today's Wall Street Journal: how the top 0.1% can live.

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Information that might be useful for people living in poverty in the Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti neighborhoods of Miami who won...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Dangerous Ideas.......

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Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original po...
Monday, November 10, 2025

Welcome to the Polycene

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On reading articles like Tom Friedman’s recent piece in the NYTimes , I realize what a cozy small world this contented retired professor liv...
Tuesday, November 04, 2025

Inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems

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DeDeo and Hobson do a commentary on a model developed by Kawakatsu et al. (open source) that explains the emergence of hierarchy in netwo...
1 comment:
Monday, October 06, 2025

Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America

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 A very revealing piece of work from Holiday et al.  Their abstract: Affective polarization is a corrosive force in American politics. Wh...
Monday, September 29, 2025

Platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture.

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 I pass on most of a recent Sam Harris piece : Charlie Kirk was a political prodigy on the Right and adored by a younger generation of Repub...
1 comment:
Friday, September 26, 2025

Evolved mental errors that underlie our current cultural and political malaise

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I recently looked back at a book I read in 2019, “ Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than ...
Friday, August 29, 2025

Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non playing character)

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I want to pass on this outstanding piece of writing from Gurwinder on Substack, in which he describes five different robotic human characte...
Monday, August 18, 2025

Polarization may be inherent in social media

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Science news reports on a fascinating recent study suggesting that just the basic functions of social media—posting, reposting, and follow...
Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The number of fake scientific journal articles is doubling every year and a half.

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I am so saddened by the demonstration by Richardson et al.(open source) of the disintegration of the safeguards against scienfic fraud tha...
Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Is liberal democracy still viable in our complex world?

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I pass on the background reading for this Sunday's (8/3/25)Austin Rainbow Forum, which I host at my house on the first Sunday of every m...
Friday, July 18, 2025

How the attention economy is devouring us. - A conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon

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Again, I archive for myself and also pass on to readers a ChatGPT4o summary of a NYT Opinion article by Ezra Klein , this time on his interv...
Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Stagnation, disruption, and the future - A conversation between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel

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A r ecent NYT Opinion article that I read through carefully when it appeared has occasioned aa lot of comment, so I have decided to use Min...